bit of wisdom from an October EP Monthly article by Dr. Silvermann, under the subheading of “Clean Up Your Own Mess” (another solid rule to live by):

“Because patients typically only see the bandage covering the lac repair, you want to make sure that it looks beautiful and everything else is cleaned up. They won’t judge your repair for a couple of days, but if the bandage looks good, they’ll think the whole thing looks good and they’ll leave happy.”

Sound advice. I’ve been admittedly guilty of some haphazard rapid bandaging after taking time to do a meticulous lac repair (though oddly in retrospect, I do give particular effort in making a cosmetically pleasing splint, cast-padding, ACE wraps, and all), so a few extra seconds to make a nice-looking bandage/covering logically might do wonders for patient satisfaction.

A brief PubMed search yielded little to nothing on this subject (if you find something, please forward it along), but it conceptually makes sense (our society is great at judging a book by its cover), and there’s little downside, so why not?

my current workplace has a decent stash of Word catheter’s, having worked in places where they are in short supply, it’s nice to have a few tricks up your sleeve if you need to improvise, such as this idea from an old ALiEM post:

DISCLAIMER:

This blog is meant as a forum for education and discussion. The information in this blog is meant to be as accurate as possible, however the accuracy or completeness of the information cannot be guaranteed. The contents of this blog should not be interpreted as medical advice for patients, and health care professionals should continue to use their clinical judgement in their daily practice.